Your gated content works against you in AI search

Joe Scott is the content director for Australia New Zealand at NP Digital

It’s 2016. You’ve just finished that 50-page white paper your team has been preparing for weeks and you’re ready to send the gated landing page and EDM live.

Now comes the best part, where you get to sit back and watch the downloads roll in with dozens of contacts the sales team can follow up on.

This approach was once the cornerstone of B2B lead generation in the golden era of the internet. It was a great formula – built for a time when clicking through and researching for yourself was the only way to discover things.

Sadly, that’s no longer the case, and in many ways the jury’s still out on the effectiveness of gated content in 2026. On the one hand, it has the potential to limit reach. On the other hand, it can be a handy lead generator. Both have merit.

But in the zero-click era, where your business must be easily accessible to AI crawlers to get in front of your target audience, gated content has some drawbacks. The biggest is this: large language models (LLMs) can’t access, interpret or cite content hidden behind forms and paywalls. So if your best insights are sitting behind a gate, the AI crawlers simply skip past you. At the same time, your competitor that made its content available on a regular landing page is being recommended to your target market.

I’ve sat in enough client meetings to know this isn’t a hypothetical; it’s already happening to brands that haven’t noticed yet. And the threat is looming as those unprepared for the zero-click era are predicted to experience a decline in traffic from 20 percent to 50 percent, according to McKinsey.

However, this doesn’t mean all your company’s content needs to be freely accessed.

A genuinely high-value asset – something built specifically for a high-intent audience already engaging with your brand – can still justify having a form to fill out. The mistake is defaulting to gating virtually everything out of habit.

My rule when thinking about whether to gate or not is this: information should be open, applications are worth a bit more effort.

Information, which could be your unique point of view, your proprietary research or your explanation of how something works, should be open because that’s what earns AI citations, and citations are what earns trust before a prospect ever speaks to you.

Applications, which could be a bespoke tool you created or more detailed explanations of your proprietary research, are still worth encouraging your user to fill out a form to access.

People will happily exchange their details for something unique and detailed. They won’t do it for something they can figure out on their own.

To give you a real-world example, perhaps you have just finished working on a survey for a client and you have heaps of raw data to build out a report. Unlike a decade ago, you want to keep this report on the lighter side and split it into two separate assets.

The findings, the data and the analysis, should be publicly published as an open page or article, written so both humans and AI models can parse and cite it clearly. The tool built on top of that work or the extra analysis into the data stays behind a gated form. The research becomes your driver of visibility, while the tool earns you leads.

Of course, if your strategy changes, so should your measurement, because none of this will work if your success is still measured by form-fills. It’s definitely a hard story to tell a CFO, so it’s important to bring finance and sales into that conversation before you split a single asset.

The best way to bring those teams on the journey is to show them what’s already happening. Organic clicks on informational pages are falling, but the content that gets cited by AI Overviews and LLMs (large language models) is still the deep, authoritative resource we publish at the top of the funnel. For most, that’s all the proof you need to demonstrate that the audience is still there, but is consuming content differently in 2026.

Years ago, that white paper worked because search meant working for the answer yourself. That has fundamentally changed. Your digital strategy should too.

Joe Scott is the content director for Australia New Zealand at NP Digital.